Eviction Records and Tenant Screening Protections

Every year, 3.6 million people across the country — disproportionately Black and Latinx women — experience  eviction filings. Evictions are a crisis that extend far beyond a single  event and create long-term barriers to securing safe and affordable housing — people with an eviction record have a harder time accessing safe and affordable housing opportunities, regardless of the outcome of the eviction case. Landlords overwhelmingly rely on tenant screening tools, with 90 percent using background checks that compile rental, credit, employment, income, and criminal histories into a simplified score or recommendation—often devoid of context or accuracy. Third-party tenant screening products package a tenant’s rental, credit, job, income, and criminal history into a format that gives a quick indication to a landlord whether they should rent to a prospective tenant. Often, landlords refuse to rent to prospective tenants because of one blemish on this record.  

Landlords consistently identify eviction records as a major red flag in an applicant’s rental history. Eviction records remain easily accessible to the public and tenant screening companies, even when the filing does not lead to an actual, completed eviction, or is resolved in a tenant’s favor. In addition, for landlords who rely on screening companies’ recommendations or scores, the algorithms used to generate these analyses are opaque, leaving tenants with little recourse to challenge a bad score. However, many of these reports are filled with inaccuracies, leaving many tenants locked out of housing opportunities, with few options for correction. 

Even when an eviction record is accurate – just a  few days overdue – it becomes a record that lasts years into the future, punishing tenants by locking them out of decent housing for years to come. Eviction records capture just a brief snapshot of someone experiencing hardship, whether due to illness, job loss, or family death. While tenants can recover from these setbacks,  the eviction record lingers, trapping them in substandard housing or preventing access to better job opportunities. Tenants are often punished with an eviction filing for exercising their legal right to withhold rent for repairs with a permanent blemish on their record because the landlord failed to provide a safe and habitable home. Tenants are then caught up in dangerous cycles of poverty as a result of policies that make these records easy to incur and difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of, despite research showing that background checks are ineffective at predicting a successful tenancy.  

Across the country, tenants are increasingly demanding stronger tenant screening protections and eviction record sealing policies that limit the influence it has on a person’s long-term housing stability. In response, policymakers are exploring and passing policies that dismantle the significant barriers eviction records create for access to stable and healthy housing, by regulating public access to such records and creating restrictions for how they can be used in rental decisions for prospective tenants. Eviction record sealing policies and tenant screening protections help shield tenants from the adverse, long-term impacts of an eviction record on housing and economic opportunities.  

Terms used for eviction record sealing may vary depending on the jurisdiction and the stage of the process the protection applies to. Eviction record sealing policies usually obscure eviction records from the public. Strong eviction record sealing policies should include exceptions that allow the record to remain accessible to key parties, like a tenant’s attorney or legal representative, case manager, and academic researchers. Some policies take the form of expungements, which remove the eviction record from a court’s record-keeping system completely; then there are vacated eviction cases, which means that the eviction judgment has been set aside or annulled. The strongest eviction record sealing policies should seal evictions at the point of filing, however many policies seal an eviction after a proceeding has ended, a judgment has been made, or upon motion of a tenant and/or their legal representative.

Overall, tenant screening processes can cause critical delays for tenants searching for housing, and leads to tenants with fewer resources to pay more in rental application fees. Tenant screening protections prevent, restrict, or clarify the power landlords and tenant screening companies have to utilize background information, like eviction, credit, or criminal history records from adversely impacting tenants. Tenant screening protections can be proscriptive measures that apply at the earlier stages of the background check process that can require landlords or consumer reporting agencies to adjust their behaviors to be in line with fair housing and reporting laws. Tenant screening protection policies can, therefore, take various forms: 

• Requiring landlords to provide uniform screening criteria to every prospective tenant who is applying to live in a unit 
• Proscribe the type of criteria that a landlord can consider utilizing when evaluating an applicant’s potential tenancy 
• Mandating that a landlord take a holistic approach when evaluating the potential of an applicant’s tenancy by giving weight to other circumstances besides an applicant’s credit, criminal, or eviction history 
• Prohibit screening policies that reject a tenant’s application to a unit solely as a result of an applicant’s credit, criminal, or eviction record history    
• Establish a shorter look-back period that landlords can consider when screening a prospective tenant 
• Prohibiting consumer reporting agencies from including certain records, like medical debt records, on consumer report products

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the federal government allows consumer reporting  companies to report eviction records that are up to seven years old. Under the FCRA, prospective landlords and property managers are also required to notify tenants if a tenant screening report or credit report was used in their decision to deny housing. If a tenant requests to know why they were denied housing, landlords and property managers are also required by law to provide contact information for the tenant screening company used, notify applicants of their right to dispute the information, and notify applicants of their entitlement to a free copy of their screening report within 60 days of their denial. However, landlords rarely make tenants aware of these rights under the FCRA and keep their own screening criteria, or the information, tools, and products they used to make a decision, ambiguous. 

When tenants attempt to exercise their rights under FCRA after finding errors in their screening reports, tenant screening companies are seldom responsive to a tenant’s requests to correct a record. State and local laws that regulate the screening criteria that landlords use, regulate the type of information tenant screening companies can include in reports, and restrict landlord and tenant screening companies’ access to eviction records, can help enforce FCRA. 

In 2023, the Biden Administration released a Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights that highlighted efforts on behalf of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to hold tenant screening companies accountable to releasing accurate information, and abiding by existing laws like the Fair Housing Act. This resulted in several agency actions, including: 

• A Request for information on the ways tenant screening affects tenants’ access to housing from the FTC and CFPB.   
• Guidance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on the application of the Fair Housing Act to the screening of applicants for rental housing. 
• Joint guidance from the FTC, CFPB, HUD, and Department of Justice on tenants’ rights during the tenant screening process. 
• Support from FTC on how to dispute inaccurate tenant screening records.

In addition to PolicyLink resources listed to the right, see Upturn, TechEquity, National Housing Law Project, and the National Consumer Law Center for additional materials and resources on sealing eviction records and regulating tenant screening practices.

• Tenant associations, community-based organizations, and other housing justice advocates can develop grassroots campaigns to build public support and advocate for strong eviction record sealing laws and tenant screening protections. 
   
• Landlords must abide by existing laws like the FCRA and the Fair Housing Act by employing more scrutiny when using third party tenant screening products as outlined in the 2024 HUD Guidance. Additionally, landlords play a key role in upholding state and local eviction record sealing, tenant screening, and fair chance housing laws by informing tenants of their rights during the background check process.
   
• Elected and appointed state and city officials propose and pass eviction records sealing laws and tenant screening policies. Legislative champions can range from wanting to enhance tenant protections to wanting to protect community members from third party tenant screening company’s unregulated algorithmic technologies and products.  
   
• Legal service providers can support tenants to identify situations in which their rights were violated  and bring forward private right of action cases or complaints against landlords and consumer reporting agencies, should they suspect breaches in federal, state or local laws. 
   
• Judges and court administrators can help inform the best means to implement changes to their record keeping systems in alignment with their existing technology and record-keeping procedures. 
   
• Data engineers can support campaigns and coalitions to better understand court record-keeping and management software and processes currently in use. They can also provide recommendations to court administrators and advocates on the software or process changes needed to restructure court record access. 
   
• Researchers can advocate for secure, anonymized databases that allow them to study eviction trends, rather than relying on unrestricted public records that can expose individuals to harm. Researchers can partner with courts, housing agencies, and advocacy groups to establish best practices for ethical data-sharing agreements and help design sealing laws that balance tenant protections with responsible data access. They can also present empirical evidence on the negative consequences of eviction records to strengthen the case for sealing policies and tenant screening protections.

• Policy Design: Many eviction sealing and expungement laws around the country put the responsibility on the tenant to seal their record if a filing has already been made public through a motion in court. There are often barriers to this process, particularly for low-income tenants, because it may mean finding a lawyer, paying fees, filing the correct motions, reaching a deal with a landlord, and then waiting for a court's finding to rule in their favor to completely seal the eviction. The strongest eviction sealing policies seal the record at the point of filing. 
   
• Administrative Capacity: Understanding the role and capacity of court administrators can also help advocates support the court’s capacity to make necessary changes to the system under the new policy. Specifically, it is critical to consider the current, software, record management procedures, and responsible parties of local and state-wide court systems. Civil courts have their own procedures, technology, and policies around record keeping and publicizing court records. Becoming familiar with these facets of the court’s record keeping system can help advocates target their advocacy strategies to the specific needs of their local or state court systems (such as increased funding for improved software or data engineering support on how to adjust existing software). 
   
• Record Accessibility for Key Parties: Eviction record sealing policies should still permit access to eviction records for key parties, such as tenant lawyers, social service case managers, and researchers. This can be done in a variety of ways such as providing a client’s name and address to match against a requested record, giving lawyers a unique login to give them increased accessibility to record databases, providing aggregate summaries of cases without identifiable information, and even implementing a delayed schedule for publicly displaying court records. This different accessibility for key parties is vital, especially for legal service providers, so that a tenant’s counsel can have the information they need in order to provide timely and effective representation to their client. Additionally, researchers rely on access to timely eviction data to investigate trends on filing patterns. Ultimately, it is necessary that any sealing or expungement legislation pursued contains specific stipulations regarding record accessibility for the parties mentioned above. 
   
• Complementary Policies: Eviction record sealing and tenant screening protections can be even more effective when paired with other policies that can disrupt a system that locks renters out of future housing opportunities. Tenant right to counsel policies provide legal support to fight evictions and ensure the best outcomes for tenants in court proceedings. A tenant right to counsel is especially supportive as attorneys can help tenants reach an agreement with their landlords to seal or expunge their record quickly and before their information is publicly released. Additionally, rental registries can help track, evaluate, and enforce local and state tenant screening laws by requesting that landlords submit information on their screening criteria, rates of denial and the reason for those denials. 
   
• Regular Evaluation: Sealing policies and tenant screening protections should integrate robust data collection to evaluate their effectiveness. Regular evaluation can help keep key government offices accountable to enforcing the law, ensure that tenants are aware of their rights, and can help produce recommendations for strengthening the policies. While quantitative evaluation may be difficult, qualitative evaluation that seeks to understand the impact this policy has had on tenants’ housing outcomes, application experiences, and eviction court proceedings is very useful. 

According to a 2025 report, rising rents and increased housing affordability challenges across the country resulted in 2.49 million people threatened with an eviction from January to September 2024. Since 2020, more than 21 states and cities have proposed and considered policies that would seal eviction records and protect the futures of tenants during an unprecedented time. The following are a few places around the country with the strongest policies that seal at the point of filing, keep pertinent information restricted from the public, or provide a low threshold for tenants to seal their own records. 
 

• In 2016, California passed state bill AB 2819 which automatically seals an eviction record by restricting public access to the records at the point of filing for 60 days. The record remains sealed unless, by the end of those 60 days, a case goes to trial and  a judgment is made in favor of the landlord. If a case takes longer than 60 days to go to trial and receive a judgment, the case remains permanently sealed. Because of AB 2819, tenants are able to file motions that address the conditions of their dwelling and request that a record be sealed as a stipulation if the case results in a settlement, without fear of a record that will have lasting repercussions. However, this process still requires tenants to avoid default in order to have their record sealed, which can be  difficult to avoid due to challenges in seeking legal representation and the quick pace of eviction proceedings. Prior to this law, California tenants needed to expedite their case and win within 60 days in order to seal their record, but this proved increasingly difficult given that court capacity and resource constraints consistently pushed cases beyond 60 days. Advocates note that the previous policy made it nearly impossible for eviction records to be sealed, even if they did win, while tenants were constantly at the whim of a landlord’s stipulations in settlements. Access to eviction records in California, as a result of AB 2819, is provided to the individuals named in an eviction case with the added benefit of receiving additional information on ways to avoid an eviction through legal aid resources and rental assistance. A 2023 qualitative analysis found that California’s sealing policy successfully reduces the amount of eviction records that are collected by consumer reporting agencies and minimizes administrative burdens for courts and for lawyers. The law also helps to increase tenants’ negotiation power during eviction proceedings, effectively balancing out disparate power dynamics between landlords and tenants. 
   
• Philadelphia advocates, tenant organizers, and policymakers recognized that eviction filings disproportionately occurring in majority Black neighborhoods undermined fair and equitable access to stable housing. The Renters’ Access Act, enacted in October of 2021, created a tenant screening policy providing guidelines for prospective landlords on how eviction records can be used when landlords review tenant applications. Under the RAA, before accepting a tenant’s application to rent a unit, landlords and property managers must provide all prospective tenants with uniform screening guidelines that specify what criteria will be used to evaluate their applications. The law prohibits tenants from being denied admission based solely on their credit score, tenant screening score, or the existence of an eviction record. If the prospective landlord rejects a prospective tenant’s application, the landlord is required to provide a written reason why the tenant’s application was rejected, along with copies of any third-party reports or information that a landlord used to make their decision. The Renters’ Access Act also prohibits landlords from considering certain criteria, including failure to pay rent or utility bills during Covid-19 emergency periods, and certain kinds of eviction records. The law also gives applicants the right to dispute inaccurate information or seek reconsideration in the case of mitigating circumstances, while requiring landlords to give time for consideration of new information. Additionally, the Renters’ Access Act contains a provision requiring an evaluation of the law every 18 months to determine the effectiveness of the law, the policy’s strongest design elements, and areas of improvement. The first evaluation from 2024 highlighted how many landlords engaged with tenants in the way the law directs, but that there is still a need for increased public education on the law. 
   
• In 2020, City Council in Washington, DC recognized the need for an emergency policy to ensure tenants were protected from eviction due to existing and pandemic-related economic uncertainties. The DC City Council acted swiftly to keep local residents safely housed and adopted legislation banning evictions for tenants who owed less than $600.  The policy also directed the DC Superior Court to seal eviction records after 30 days if the case ended in the tenant’s favor, or in three years if the judgment was in favor of the landlord. In early 2022, the DC City Council passed the Eviction Record Sealing Authority and Fairness in Renting Amendment Act of 2022 which retained and strengthened many of the policies that were passed in 2020, and includes provisions for both eviction record sealing and tenant screening.  Additional protections include prohibiting landlords from considering previous eviction records as a factor when determining a prospective tenant’s application for housing. The policy also provides a mechanism for tenants to file a motion for their records to be sealed earlier than three years under certain circumstances (such as if a tenant faced a retaliatory eviction, or if the landlord and tenant entered into a settlement agreement that didn’t end in an eviction). In the early months of implementation, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia was able to seal and restrict public access to hundreds of thousands of eviction records.  
   
• The Colorado legislature passed a statewide law in 2020 to prevent eviction records from harming the future housing prospects of tenants. The legislation requires that eviction records be concealed and the names of all parties involved be kept from the public until the end of an eviction proceeding, if proceedings end in favor of a tenant, or if both parties agree to seal the record. In 2022, advocates worked to support the passage of additional legislation that provides exceptions for attorneys to access court records with permission of one of the parties included in the record, in order to provide legal advice or evaluate a client’s case for representation or mediation. Advocates in Colorado note that this law has worked well to suppress information or improve negotiations with a landlord when settling a case, but there is still a lack of clarity regarding applicability of the law to older eviction records.  
   
• In 2023, the Oregon state legislature passed a set of housing-related laws through HB 2001 which included a provision requiring courts to seal select eviction records every year. Some records that can be sealed are cases where tenants were ordered to leave, have paid all debts with their landlord, and occurred over five years ago. Other records qualify for sealing within a year if negotiations were made between a tenant and landlord to avoid a trial and all stipulations of that agreement (like backpayment of rent) were completed. Finally, eviction cases that were dismissed or ended in favor of a tenant are sealed annually. The advocacy surrounding this and other laws in HB 2001, was composed of a wide-range of advocates; from tenant groups to organizations focused on food security, an overwhelming majority of testimony submitted for the legislation was in support of the provisions in this bill, including the protections offered by eviction record sealing. In January 2025,Oregon courts evaluated the eligibility of 160,000 eviction records and whether or not they could be sealed under the new law. This process resulted in 47,000 records to be successfully erased from court systems and the backgrounds of many Oregonians. The courts are currently evaluating whether an additional 50,000 cases can be sealed, with the hopes of completing this first annual process by the end of 2025.